I like to do things that frighten me. When I’m afraid, I understand more things. I want the feeling... All my instincts cry out against it, every morning anew. Then I say, 'I should do it. If I don’t do it, no one will do it for me'..

David Grossman

I have packed myself into silence so deeply and for so long that I can never unpack myself using words. When I speak, I only pack myself a little differently.

Herta Müller, Bassure, 1987 Nobel prize literature 2009

Life is full of strange absurdities, which, strangely enough, do not even need to appear plausible,

since they are true.

Luigi Pirandello, Six Characters in Search of an AuthorNobel prize literature 1934

Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my min

Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own

If you have no more happiness to give: give me your pain.

Lou Andreas von Salomé, Psychoanalist

In books we never find anything but ourselves. Strangely enough, that always gives us great pleasure, and we say the author is a genius.

Thomas Mann

We are poor indeed if we are only sane.

Donald W. Winnicott, Psychoanalist

People who believe themlseves to be the incarnation of good have a distorted view of the world.

Tzvetan Todorov, historian, philosopher, sociologist, essayist

For there is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes.